Back in April an NPR reporter and editor did something no one expected. Uri Berliner wrote an exposé on the hard-left political bias at his own organization. It wasn’t that anyone was surprised to find out that National Public Radio had a pronounced left-progressive-Democrat bias. Anyone who has tuned in to the public broadcaster for the past few decades knows that. In fact, NPR has always been biased to the left since its founding in 1970.
But that’s been true of most mainstream broadcasters. Those of us old enough to remember when most Americans got their news from three broadcast networks and a few newspapers know that all of them have been at least tilted toward the left side of the spectrum. Yet it used to be possible for these news organizations to do at least an adequate job disclosing factual truth, and they used to at least make an effort to represent the conservative point of view.
That must seem quaint, even Pollyanna-ish to read in 2024. How quickly the media devolved into a house organ for the Democrat party and its colorful, merry band of blue-haired misfits over the past 10 years. This Time Magazine cover from 2014 was a harbinger. It depicts a male actor named “Laverne Cox” who tells the entire world he’s transgender “woman,” and he got more than his 15 minutes of fame starring in a show about a women’s prison.
It’s not that Time covered the topic of transgenderism. It’s that Time asserted, editorially, that there is such a thing as a transgender “civil rights frontier.” The implication was clear: get on board or you’re not the kind of American who deserves a say.
Then, of course, Donald Trump launched his presidential campaign the next year and that put the final knife in the heart of American journalism’s pretense to objectivity. Every single mainstream outlet became rabidly opposed to Trump. Every scurrilous rumor from extramarital affairs to working with the Kremlin to hiring prostitutes to urinate on, they printed them all breathlessly.
Let’s go back to NPR’s Uri Berliner from above. What was shocking about Berliner’s targeting of his own employer (yes, he was fired) was just how bad the bias at NPR really was:
“Concerned by the lack of viewpoint diversity, I looked at voter registration for our newsroom. In D.C., where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans. None.”
—Uri Berliner in The Free Press
Not a single conservative working in the Washington, D.C. office of the nation’s publicly funded radio station.
Again, this is no longer shocking, so no one will be surprised at some interesting data from Syracuse University examining the political leanings of American journalists from 1971 to 2022.
Those who said they were Republican in 1971 made up about 26 percent of newsrooms. By 2022, that was down to less than five percent. And notice also how the share of self-identified Democrats rose from about 28 percent in 2013 to about 36 percent in 2022. It’s anyone’s guess what the real sentiments are for the rising share who call themselves independent. There are likely Democrats and Republicans in that group who don’t want to show their true colors.
Users on X (Twitter) had plenty to say about this chart.
